55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA, 94102/ E4TT.org/ (510) 684-0505

Media Contacts:

Nanette McGuinness / nanette@E4TT.org

Renata Volchinskaya / renata@E4TT.org

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 11, 2026

Ensemble for These Times

 

Announces

 

“El Tiempo Latine”

 

Performed by

 

Nanette McGuinness, soprano, Chelsea Hollow coloratura soprano, violinist Lylia Guion, 

Megan Chartier, cello, and Margaret Halbig, piano

 

Saturday, May 16, 2026 at 7:30 pm

In-Person at the Center for New Music, San Francisco

And livestreamed on E4TT’s YouTube channel

(Full calendar listing below)

 

San Francisco – Award-winning SF contemporary chamber group Ensemble for These Times (E4TT) is excited to announce the closing concert of its 18th Home Season, “El Tiempo Latine” (Latin Time), a celebration of the release of our sixth recording exploring the wide spectrum of classical chamber music by contemporary Latine composers. The program will feature six of the exciting contemporary Latine composers on the group’s upcoming album: Gabriela Lena Frank, Tania León, Carla Lucero, Claudia Montero, Brennan Stokes, and José Bragato. The concert will be free (donations welcome) to attend in-person at the Center for New Music, 55 Taylor St, San Francisco and online on E4TT’s YouTube Channel.

E4TT’s 2025/26 season is supported in part by the San Francisco Arts Council, Grants for the Arts, the Amphion Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Ross McKee Foundation. E4TT is honored to be a fiscally sponsored affiliate of InterMusic SF, a non-profit organization dedicated to small-ensemble music in the San Francisco Bay Area.

 

About “El Tiempo Latine”

E4TT will close our 18th Home Season with a concert celebrating the release of our sixth recording, featuring music by modern Latine composers, “El Tiempo Latine” (“Latin Time”). The program will feature works from the new album by three Bay Area composers–Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities recipient, Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972), Opera America Discovery Grant composer Carla Lucero (b. 1964), and Miss Gay San Francisco 2024 and Miss Golden Gate 2023, Peruvian-American composer Brennan Stokes (b. 1990)–Pulitzer Prize winner, Cuban-American Tania León (b. 1943) and Argentinian Latin Grammy® winners Claudia Montero (1962-2021) and José Bragato (1915-2017).

Soprano Nanette McGuinness, Coloratura Chelsea Hollow, violinist Lylia Guion, cellist Megan Chartier, and pianist Margaret Halbig) will perform the program, which will be presented at the Center for New Music in San Francisco and livestreamed via E4TT’s YouTube channel. The concert will be free to attend both in person and online.

 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Cellist MEGAN CHARTIER is “unafraid to display gutsy abandon” (South Florida Classical Review). She has performed internationally as a soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral cellist. Her current positions include core cellist of the Astralis Chamber Ensemble and principal cellist of Opera San Luis Obispo. Past positions include principal cellist of the Miami Symphony and the Pacific Region International Summer Music Academy; she has also recently performed with the San Antonio Symphony One Found Sound, Nu Deco Ensemble, and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. A semi-finalist in the 2017 PRISMA Concerto Competition, she won 1st prize in the Ann Arbor Society of Musical Arts’ 2015 Young Artist Competition and the 2015 Miami Music Festival Concerto Competition, conducted by Grzegorz Nowak of the Royal Philharmonic.

 

Violinist LYLIA GUION has performed as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician in France and in the Bay Area. Her extensive orchestral experience includes the Orchestre Philharmonique of Radio-France (Paris) before moving to California in 1997, where she has performed with the Berkeley, Oakland, California, Marin, and Skywalker Symphony Orchestras, as well as Pacific Chamber Orchestra and Midsummer Mozart Festival. She also served as concertmaster with Livermore and Pocket Opera. An avid educator, she has taught in various music schools, coached youth orchestras, and organized community concerts. She is a Feldenkrais practitioner and currently applies this method at her private violin studio.

 

E4TT Pianist MARGARET HALBIG is in high demand as a collaborative artist in both the instrumental and vocal fields. She is currently associate chair of the Voice Department and principal vocal coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she also frequently collaborates with faculty and student singers and instrumentalists. Halbig was the pianist for Young Women’s Chorus of San Francisco from 2014 through 2023, and in 2013 was appointed collaborative piano coordinator of Interlochen Arts Camp. An advocate of new and contemporary music, she is the pianist and a board member of the new music collective Ninth Planet and has also. Halbig earned her DMA from UC Santa Barbara and performance degrees from the University of Missouri, Kansas City Conservatory, and University of Evansville, Indiana.

 

Coloratura soprano CHELSEA HOLLOW is known for her “soaring high range” and “stage panache” and has built a reputation for premiering new works including the roles of Helen Chavez in Dolores (2023) by Nicolas Benavides and Fenghuang in Hutong (2020) by Kui Dong. Hollow “has rewritten the book on the potential of musical activism," exploring ways to make new and traditional classical music exciting to new audiences. In 2023, she released her debut album “Cycles of Resistance” with Aerocade Music, featuring 22 commissioned works chronicling examples of human resilience in Mandarin, Dutch, Turkish, Arabic, Sanskrit, and Czech, in addition to English. In recognition of this work, she was invited by the United Nations Office of Human Rights to take part in a panel discussion on Art and Activism.

 

Soprano and E4TT co-founder and Artistic Executive Director NANETTE MCGUINNESS has performed in 13 languages on two continents in over 25 roles with the Silesian State (Czech Republic), Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, Pacific Repertory Opera, Trinity Lyric Opera, and Livermore Valley Opera, among others. Solo concert engagements include Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, as well as Shéhérézade (Ravel), Nuits d’étés (Berlioz), Stabat Mater (Rossini), Requiem (Fauré), Gloria (Vivaldi), Lord Nelson Mass (Haydn), Vesperae Solennes (Mozart), and Handel’s Messiah and Solomon. McGuinness has been featured on seven albums with Centaur and Yuggoth Records, and her CD of music by 19th and 20th century women composers, Fabulous Femmes (Centaur)—was called “perfect for the song recital lover” by Chamber Music Magazine. She earned her PhD in Music at UC Berkeley and her MM in Vocal Performance from Holy Names College.

ABOUT ENSEMBLE FOR THESE TIMES

Winner of The American Prize in 2021 for Chamber Music Performance, ENSEMBLE FOR THESE TIMES (E4TT) consists of award-winning soprano/Artistic Executive Director Nanette McGuinness, cellist Megan Chartier, pianist Margaret Halbig, and co-founder/ Senior Artistic Advisor composer David Garner. E4TT made its international debut in Berlin in 2012; was sponsored by the U.S. Embassy in Budapest for a four-city tour of Hungary in 2014; and performed at the Krakow Culture Festival in 2016 and 2022, and at the Conservatorio Teresa Berganza in Madrid in 2017. In California, E4TT has performed at the Paderewski Festival, the LAMOTH, UCLA, and in the Bay Area at the German Consulate General, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Old First Concerts, JCC Peninsula, Trinity Chamber Concerts, and Noontime Concerts, among other venues.

E4TT’s five albums have all medaled in the Global Music Awards: Emigres & Exiles in Hollywood (2024) featuring music by some of the talented émigré composers who fled persecution during WWII for Hollywood, changing movie music as we know it; The Guernica Project (2022), commemorating the 85th anniversary of the horrific carpet bombing of civilians and Picasso’s masterwork in response; Once/Memory/Night: Paul Celan (2020), honoring the centennial of the seminal 20th-century poet; The Hungarians: From Rózsa to Justus (2018), with works by Hungarian émigré Miklós Rózsa, and three of his compatriots who perished in the Holocaust; and Surviving: Women’s Words, (2016), new music to poetry by women Holocaust survivors. E4TT’ s sixth album, El Tiempo Latine (Latine time–music by contemporary Latina and Latino composers) will be released on Aerocade Music on May 8, 2026. The group began its ongoing weekly podcast of conversations with underrepresented creatives, “For Good Measure,” in 2022.

 

CALENDAR LISTING

Saturday, May 16, 2026, at 7:30 pm, San Francisco, “El Tiempo Latine”

Artists: Soprano Nanette McGuinness, coloratura soprano Chelsea Hollow, violinist Lylia Guion, cellist Megan Chartier, and pianist Margaret Halbig

Repertoire: Music by Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972), Tania León (b. 1943), Carla Lucero (b. 1964), Claudia Montero (1962-2021), José Bragato (1915-2017), and Brennan Stokes (b. 1990)

Venue: Center for New Music, 55 Taylor Street, San Francisco, and livestreamed on E4TT’s YouTube channel

Tickets: FREE in-person (RSVP recommended) and online (livestreamed)

Pre-Concert Composer Talk: 7:00 pm

RSVP: https://bit.ly/3OPSRVc 

INFO: https://E4TT.org/tiempo.html

 

For more information about E4TT’s 2025/26 Bay Area Home Season, please visit our website.

High resolution jpgs are available for download https://E4tt.org/presskit.html.

For more information about E4TT’s latest recording, “Emigres & Exiles in Hollywood,” please visit https://E4TT.org/emigresEPK.html or contact Max Horowitz 347.267.9563 / maxcrossover@gmail.com

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